Goodwill is incredibly hard to build up and very easy to destroy. This change tells developers that we do not support apps that are “finished” and never updated. It tells our users their apps they’re looking for may suddenly stop being available for them to install.

Nobody is going to stop to think “why” this was done. They’re just going to hate it. In the case of users, this is where they go to the internet and install whatever they find, which will become a prime target for malware if it isn’t already.

And for the few who do understand why…it just comes across as fundamentally lazy. There’s a number inside Google that shows how many apps are available for each SDK. This change makes that number go down for old versions. But that number is irrelevant! This was to stop harm.

We have existing mechanisms to remove malware from the Play Store. This is nothing new! Old apps which exhibit bad behavior can be removed selectively. Apps that use problematic APIs do so because Android allows them to. That can stop being the case! Why was this not scoped?

I *know* this is more work. I really do. But you have to do it. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t mention this to you all when I was at Google. I’m telling you know, and I hope you undo this before someone sideloads something they shouldn’t have. I was waiting for an example to show…